Several years ago, writer and director Anthony DiBlasi had a minor horror hit on his hands with Last Shift. As its title implied, Last Shift focused on a rookie cop working alone in an abandoned police station on its ‘last shift’ before closing. It’s story of murderous cult members who committed suicide in the station […]
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As slashers declined in popularity by the late 1980s, horror went into something of a temporary recession. The decline coincided with a growth in the VHS market. As a result, many horror movies saw brief or no theatrical runs and instead went straight to videostore shelves. Plenty of obscure horror movies languished in Blockbuster in […]
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We’re digging deep into the 80s horror library for this edition of The Obscuratorium. In total, the United Kingdom added 72 movies – mostly from the horror genre – to their ‘Video Nasties‘ list. This was part of a moral panic that saw sweeping hysteria over the perceived corrupting effect of horror on youth. Just […]
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Dreams and nightmares should be fertile ground for horror movies. To date, we still don’t really know much about our dreams. Nonetheless the horror genre has seldom exploited this unknown to great effect. Of course, Wes Craven set the bar with A Nightmare on Elm Street, which recently made its way to the National Film […]
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For his feature-length debut, writer and director Kerry Harris mashes several subgenres together. After a limited release in 2020, Dreamkatcher is widely available now on VOD streaming services. There’s bits of ‘creepy kids‘ horror along with ‘haunted objects‘ and a ‘terrible place‘ in the form of … yes, an isolated cabin. Personally, I’d like to […]
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Freddy Krueger and the Elm Street franchise are horror royalty. Wes Craven’s ‘boogeyman’ sits with Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers as part of the contemporary ‘holy trinity’ of horror. Across four decades, the Elm Street movies have grossed approximately $370 million. But like most horror franchises, each successive sequel generally saw a drop in quality. […]
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Sleeping and dreams are fertile ground for horror films. Look no further than Wes Craven’s horror masterpiece, A Nightmare on Elm Street for proof. Yet to date, no horror movie has come close to replicating the terror Freddy Krueger inspired. However, recent supernatural thriller, Mara, has an almost perfect hook for a horror movie. Sleep […]
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Aside from camp counsellors, does anyone have it harder in horror than professional dancers? Ballet is an apparently brutal profession. And we’ve probably all heard that performers suffer for their craft. The latest straight-to-video psychological horror outing, Bloody Ballet, looks to tread some familiar ground. One part Black Swan, one part Suspiria, Bloody Ballet, or Fantasma, looks […]
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